Abstract Unity among psychologists and a cure for the identity crisis will not come to fruition by denying those who wish to expand their horizons the opportunity to pursue prescription privileges. More basically, psychologists should by now realize that neurobiological processes are intrinsic to behaviour and behavioural change. Psychologists have contributed to the accumulation of this knowledge. Better conceptualizations of behaviour than are possible from a dichotomous medical model are available to psychologists. These can and should result in better ways to formulate treatment needs of clients/patients, where the interaction between drug and information/therapy will optimize outcome for some patients. This will enhance psychology's uniqueness as a discipline. Dr. Glenn Walters (this issue) has written an enlightened and balanced paper arguing first, subtly, and then more forcefully against the pursuit of prescription privileges by psychologists. I say enlightened because he does not raise the disingenuous argument concerning psychologists' abilities to develop competency to prescribe, which he concedes is not accurate. The article is also balanced in that it presents some counter-arguments to his own position, in keeping with numerous findings relating to persuasiveness in the social psychology literature. Notwithstanding the above, I would like to share with my colleagues why I am not at all convinced by his arguments and think that psychology will miss a challenging opportunity by neglecting to vigorously pursue prescription privileges. In doing this, I will first make a few comments on specific points made in my colleague's article and then go beyond in addressing what I think are some major limitations in the traditionalist approach to psychology. In his opening paragraph, Dr. Walters draws an analogy between a developing science and a developing individual, noting that psychology has looked to either physics or medicine upon which to model its personality. He goes on to say Psychology's desire to gain acceptance as a science, along the lines of physics, has given rise to a plethora of conceptual mini-models that have appeared to splintered psychological research and (Yanchar & Slife, 1997). This statement requires further analysis. Many psychologists have never taken a university level course in physics and do not define their constructs or variables as physicists do. Physics looks for a few fundamental principles which can be used to explain and predict and control many phenomena. Reductionism is not a religious belief but a logical requirement for explanation to occur. If a phenomenon is explained, prediction and control will flow from the explanation. Psychologists, on the other hand, tend to study a phenomenon in isolation, invent a jargon to describe the phenomenon, and because of the idiosyncratic (not to mention nonreductionistic) nature of their definitions, cannot really tell whether their thinking is consistent or inconsistent with colleagues working on a related phenomenon only a few conceptual millimeters removed from theirs. This is the true root of the so called identity crisis in psychology. For example, in my own area of practice and research, the predominant predictor of future violent re-offending, the Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (vane; see Quinsey et al., 1998), is an atheoretical actuarial tool, and while it works arguably better than naive clinical judgement, it is not based on any coherent theory of behaviour. The vRAG is therefore both unable to inform intervention nor is it able to reflect dynamic changes in the individual over time. Such approaches to prediction, despite the best scientific intentions of psychologists who construct these types of instruments, are actually antiscientific in that they split explanation, prediction, and control and are conceptually severed from the order running the universe from the subatomic to neurobiological levels of organization. …